Archive for the ‘mafia 2’ tag

Posted on 17th Sep 2010 at 11:06 by Richard Swinburne with 14 comments

I've recently completed Mafia 2 and despite spending far too many hours looking at the benchmarks I decided to grab the Jimmy's Vendetta DLC because I still wanted something more.

I don't know what I really expected, but I think my thick, rose-tinted glasses for the original Mafia created a blind faith that Mafia 2's DLC might offer...something. I'd read it was designed to be more 'Open World', with mission selection instead of the exclusively linear, point-to-point play that Mafia 2's singleplayer forced on you.

I didn't come away thinking Mafia 2 should have been a more open world 'GTA in the 50s' though, because what it needed more than that was a better story. Although Empire Bay was clearly designed with open world in mind, 2K must have dropped it from single player at some point. Jimmy's Vendetta restores the open world, but it'll still leave you feeling disappointed and wanting more because it suffers from many of the same flaws as the original.

You see, Jimmy is even less likeable and relateable than Vito or Joe. He looks like Terry Tibbs, but with the appeal of Teri Hatcher (that link's SFW but not SF-stomach) and the attitude of Mad Max.

It happens in the prison showers, when Vito is told to do some cleaning and is left alone with some nasty men who express a desire to do nasty things to him. Vito wants none of this, which is consistent with his character, so he puts up a fight. Five or six punches later, it fades to black and Vito moves calmly on to the next scene.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with the event when it happens that way; it’s a little flat, perhaps, but that’s it. What bothers me more though is what happens if you don’t manage to fight the bullies off. Namely, nothing; you get a game over sequence and then have to restart the fight. Vito doesn’t actually get raped, no matter what you do.

To be clear, I don’t want Vito to get raped, but I do think that if you’re going to have a rape scene like that in your game then you should provide for all outcomes. Especially since Mafia 2 often lets you fail missions without consequence. You might be told to deliver X parcels in Y minutes, ending in a cutscene where you’re teased for poor driving if you don’t manage it. There’s no game over if you fail to impress the Don, so why should there be one if you’re defending against rapists?